Shattered
by mrsProbie
Summary: Severus dies. But dying isn't a simple thing. It's a process. A little trippy. DH compliant. Written for Umbrella-ella's Seven Slytherins Competition.


**A/N: Written for Umbrella-ella's Seven Slytherins Competition. I know it isn't exactly traditional "drama," but it's what came to mind with the prompt given, and it's, uhm, dramatic, right?**

**Character: Severus Snape; Genre: Drama; Prompt: Shattered**

**Word count: 1019**

At first I had felt myself growing weaker, becoming less capable of struggling as my life force quite literally spilled out of me onto the cool earthen ground beneath. The snake had not bitten to kill immediately; no, her master was less merciful than that. She had bitten far more specifically than that: I would bleed out. Without treatment- and treatment was impossible- I would be dying a slow, painful death.

Then, forcing myself to look into the boy's eyes- no, _her_ eyes- I felt myself calming. I was unsure if the effect was due to the feeling those eyes gave me- _her _eyes, even if they were cruelly pasted onto _his_ face- or if perhaps calm was just what one felt before ascending- descending?- into the afterlife. Incapable of doing anything but relaxing further in the face of either alternative, I lay staring into those eyes- _her eyes_, I couldn't help but think once again, her _eyes!_- willing myself to die.

Slowly, things began to fall apart. The world was fraying at the ends, at first only losing wisps along the edging, eventually unraveling entirely. The threads tangled into a thick fabric, which folded over itself to form a tube. Looking through the tube, I saw a mirror, and in it, instead of my own reflection, I saw those eyes, the Potter boy's eyes, her eyes, _Lily's_ eyes.

"Lily!" I tried to scream, but couldn't- or perhaps I did, but I didn't realize it. I couldn't be sure; I still can't. "Lily," I cried. It became my battle cry, my regular hymnal, my moan of ecstasy and my groan of frustration. I felt a thousand lives' worth of grief and inspiration in those moments. "Lily."

Looking up once more through my tube of woven tangles of reality, I saw her eyes still. I was without doubt that these were hers, not the boy's. Hers were knowledgeable where his were uneducated, hers were restrained where his were wild, and hers were distinctly Lily's whereas his... his could've been anyone's, and I couldn't have cared less.

"Lily?" I called when the eye blinked. It fluttered. "Lily!" The movements became more and more rapid, reaching a frenzy of uncontrolled, indeed uncontrollable, blinking and rolling. "_Lily!_" Suddenly, just as its fluttering reached the apex of the severity of its near convulsions, it froze. I blinked several times, convinced at first that the issue was with my vision, not with Lily. I tried to pull back to look past the telescope, but found myself incapable of leaning backwards, or even tilting my head.

I closed my eyes hard, then opened them again to look through to Lily. I only remembered it was a mirror when I saw the crack spreading. It looked as though someone had hit the mirror with something precisely where her pupil had been. The frozen reflection of her eye was widened in fear, as though she had seen it coming but found herself unable to dodge and so widened her eyes, unwittingly increasing the target size for whatever was coming her way.

"Lily," I whispered dejectedly as the crack worsened. "Lily." The center of the reflection was beyond a cobweb now; it had reached the point of being nothing but powder, ground down mirror. The reflection was gone and was slowly disappearing from the pupil out. At the last moment possible, when all that was left was the very outer rim of those eyes- _her eyes_, I reminded myself- the entire mirror fell backwards into darkness, pitch darkness, nothingness.

_Am I in hell? _No. Hell would be seeing her. Hell would be seeing her with him. I lay still, incapable even then of movement, content that I was not in hell.

Slowly, the lights came on. It was so gradual that I thought for quite a while that my eyes were either fooling me or simply adjusting well to the darkness. No, it was true, there was some sort of ambient light source slowly growing or increasing. There was no overhead lighting, and from what I could tell I was not glowing; there were no surfaces on which to check for shadows for a hint of where to search, but of course even if there were, I wouldn't have been able to crane my head to look around.

Then, I fell. I fell for hours. My landing was neither particularly gentle nor particularly rough. I simply felt the ground beneath me. My eyes were closed; I had been attempting to sleep during my fall. When I finally reopened them, I slammed them back shut in surprise before slowly opening them once again, one at a time, for good.

I was face to face with Lily Evans. Not her eyes in her husband's face on her son's body. Not her reflection in some sort of self-deluding funhouse mirror. Lily Evans, in mind and spirit. She looked older, very little like I remembered her. She dressed differently, walked differently, styled her hair differently. But it was most definitely her. She had the eyes. _Her _eyes.

She gave a small, watery smile and extended a hand to help me up. I gladly took it and drew her in for a hug. Her husband was hovering a few meters back, and he waved sheepishly. When she let me go, she kissed each cheek and motioned for me to head towards Potter. I raised an eyebrow, but she nodded. I followed her instruction. When I came close to the man, he extended a hand.

I looked down on it. I considered spitting on him. I considered kicking him. I considered hexing him, wondered whether I had my wand, whether I could outdraw him. But I did none of those things. Lily wouldn't have liked it. They had waited for me, had come to meet me, had drawn me out of purgatory and into... wherever this was. I shook his hand.

"Thank you," he said, and I was shocked to notice tears streaming down his face now. "Thank you- for taking care of Harry."

"Thank you," Lily echoed from my left. "You're a good man."


End file.
